Analytics for Digital Earth - Workshop 5

Dates: 9th October 2023

Time: 9.30am

Location: Arc/Online

Speakers: The 5th Analytics for Digital Earth workshop focused on energy and infrastructure. The first speaker was Dr Jethro Browell (University of Glasgow) who gave us an overview of what a digital twin was in the context of energy infrastructure and some interesting use cases. We then had Prof Fiona Bradley (University of Glasgow) who spoke about performance digital twins, and a project looking at creating digital twins for university buildings, including the ARC where the event was held. Next, we had Prof James Yu (SP Energy Networks) who came to talk to us about the ENSIGN (Energy System Digital Twin) project to design a digital twin to model the future UK energy system. Finally, Prof Gordon Blair (UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology) spoke about information management frameworks for digital twins.

Discussions: There were two breakout discussion sessions, with the group split into two in-person groups and one online group for each session. Discussion points focused around:

  • How to design a Digital Earth? – How do you get the necessary computing and how do we fairly distribute it? Train it as one, or train parts independently with adjustments?
  • FAIR principles – How do we meet the FAIR principles and who’s responsibility is it?
  • Open data – How do we commercialise data, but make it freely available for those who aren’t looking to monetarise it? How do we effectively manage data transfers?
  • Data accuracy – How do we determine whether data is accurate and how do we combine data of multiple types?
  • Future needs – How do we protect again future needs and changes?
  • Model coupling – How do we join digital twins? How do we effectively communicate between them and how do we couple them? API as a communication tool, but how can this be done effectively? How do we propagate uncertainty through connected digital twins?

The way forward: This will be the final workshop of the Analytics for Digital Earth workshops. We would like to thank all of those that spoke and took part in the series, and hope that you enjoyed the events and found them useful.